Alfred W. McCoy — The CIA and Me: How I Learned Not to Love Big Brother

In 2010, almost a decade into this secret war with its voracious appetite for information, the Washington Post reported that the national security state had swelled into a “fourth branch” of the federal government — with 854,000 vetted officials, 263 security organizations, and over 3,000 intelligence units, issuing 50,000 special reports every year.

Though stunning, these statistics only skimmed the visible surface of what had become history’s largest and most lethal clandestine apparatus. According to classified documents that Edward Snowden leaked in 2013, the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies alone had 107,035 employees and a combined “black budget” of $52.6 billion, the equivalent of 10% percent of the vast defense budget.…

Makes the Gestapo, Stasi, and KGB look tame by comparison. "But our guys are not at all like that." Read on.

Counterpunch
The CIA and Me: How I Learned Not to Love Big Brother

Alfred W. McCoy | J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison

This piece has been adapted and expanded from the introduction to Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power. It originally appeared in TomDispatch.

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Afghanistan and the CIA Heroin Ratline